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Challenges of mid-sized cities in Asia

For six months, Maria Mejia worked at the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as an intern for Capacity Development and Sustainable Cities. This gave her access to the inner soul of two of the greatest multilateral organizations boosting development projects worldwide. Specifically, she assisted the Cities Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA), a regional program supporting cities to design and implement urban development projects.

Localizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda

One of the core aims of CDIA is to streng­then local capac­ities to better em­brace and im­ple­ment the SDGs agen­da. City repre­senta­tives but also na­tional agen­cies i.e. minis­tries and multi­lateral organ­iza­tions as the UN-HABI­TAT and ICLEI (Lo­cal Gov­ern­ments for Sus­taina­bility) work hand-to-hand with CDIA to achieve this goal. Na­tional stake­hold­ers pro­vide CDIA an inven­tory of needs and knowledge gaps cities face and inter­na­tional part­ners sup­port the de­sign and im­ple­men­tation of city-to-city ex­changes. In this re­gard, her main task was to con­duct an as­sess­ment on the results and im­pact of CDIA’s capac­ity build­ing activi­ties throughout the last 10 years. To this end she ana­lyzed both quan­tita­tive and quali­tative data on 116 train­ing activi­ties in­volving roughly 3.000 partic­ipants, and an open-ended sur­vey to 1.000 partic­ipants she con­duct­ed to trace the im­pacts CDIA’s activi­ties had in the daily work­ing life of high-level City repre­senta­tives.

Urban Ecology

Group picture: Young people, positioned around an old car, laugh at the camera. In the background are green hills, mountains and blue sky.
The GIZ team of CDIA after a team Workshop in Batangas. This photo features the famous Taal Volcano in the back as well as a Jeepney, Filipino’s most popular way of public transportation.


Her role in CDIA also dealt with providing recommendations on how to incorporate urban biodiversity and urban ecosystem services con­si­de­ra­tions into CDIA projects targeting open areas in the city – wetlands, creeks, rivers, corridors and parks. As a pilot exercise, she supported the Rejuvenation of the Santa Inez Creek in Panaji project - capital city of the state of Goa in India. This project had an immense potential for local biodiversity, for instance for birdlife watching and urban gardening, but also to increase the city’s ability to cope with climate change effects, for example by increasing the vegetation along the creek preventing floods in the Monsoon season and helping mitigate Urban Heat Island effects in dry seasons.

This internship was a step ahead in under­standing the challenges that cities in the Global South face, an interest that orbits both her academic and professional career. The current Urban Age poses unprecedented relevance to cities not only as problems but moreover as solution to climate change.

Welcome note of Maria Mejia at CDIA
Personal web page of Maria Mejia

Text: Elite Graduate Program "Global Change Ecology"

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